”That evil word, the evil”: how the lexia “diabo” became a taboo in the spoken Portuguese in Maranhão State

Abstract

This work, guided by theoretical and methodological principles of sociolinguistics and dialectology, and developed with the corpus collected by the Linguistic Atlas of Maranhão/ALiMA in some towns of Maranhão State, focuses on the religious linguistic taboo based on question 159 of the lexical-semantic questionnaire of the ALiMA which verifies the different names for “diabo”. It examines how that lexia became a taboo, and tries to identify resources used by speakers to escape the taboo lexia. The Maranhão linguistic-cultural universe is read, seeking to investigate the extent to which variables of diatopical, diageneric, and diageracional types, and religious orientation, interfere with the use of the lexia “diabo”.